Abandon - Meg Cabot [28]
“I am not a bird,” he said in a dangerous voice. “I don’t require aid, from you or anyone else. Does your mother know where you are right now?”
It was funny that he mentioned my mother. Because it was her voice I was hearing in my head just then, urging me to tell him that thing I hadn’t said the last time I’d seen him, that awful day at school…that thing he hadn’t given me a chance to say. He’d left before I could.
Well, he’d had to. The police were coming. Again.
Not that my mother knew anything about him, except what the psychiatrists (and now, I knew, Grandma) all believed: that he wasn’t real.
But if Mom had known what I knew about him, she’d have wanted me to say it. I obviously needed to say it, now more than ever, because it was clear that my initial assessment of him hadn’t been that far off:
He was a wild thing, like that dove I’d found, badly in need of someone’s aid, even if he didn’t agree.
And though by helping him, I might only be hurting him more, I had to at least try.
So I said what I probably should have said to him a long time ago: “I’m sorry.”
His eyes narrowed even more. “Pardon me?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, more loudly this time. “For what I did to you the day I died. If there were…consequences. Especially for you.”
He didn’t respond, except to continue to stare down at me as if I were the one with the antisocial personality disorder. Who gives a girl a necklace — especially one with a stone that changed colors like the sky, sometimes gray as a February morning, other times, black as midnight — and then hurls it across a cemetery when she very politely tries to give it back because she suspects he might be enduring consequences on her behalf?
But why was I the only one apologizing? It would have been nice to hear a “sorry” or two out of him.
Because he had been horrible to me the day we’d met.
And, yes, he’d sort of made up for some of it by what he’d done for me at the jewelry store, and later, at school with Mr. Mueller.
But still. I’d lost so much. True, I’d gotten my life back. But what about all the things I hadn’t gotten back? Like my parents’ marriage, and Hannah, for instance. I hadn’t been back at school for even a full day after I got out of the hospital before my then best friend, Hannah Chang, dumped me for telling her that — among other things, like hanging out at the mall hoping to catch glimpses of her older brother’s friends, and neglecting Double Dare — the “Hold your breath when you go by the graveyard, or evil spirits will possess your soul” thing we used to like to play was stupid, and that I wasn’t doing it anymore.
True, at fifteen, we were too old for things like that, anyway.
But I hadn’t helped matters by cheerfully informing her, “Don’t worry about the evil, Hannah. I can see it now. And I’ll protect you from it.”
No wonder she called me crazy. It’s what everyone at school started calling me afterwards.
I guess I can’t blame them. Why wouldn’t you call someone who says she can see evil — and has the ability to protect people from it — crazy? Especially when she later failed so spectacularly to do so.
I know Hannah only called me crazy because she was worried about me. She must have thought I’d come back from the hospital after my accident acting…well, a little mentally unstable.
Hannah told me she was sorry later, and I could tell she really meant it. Friends sometimes drift apart, she said. Like she had with Double Dare. She just didn’t have time for horses anymore, she explained. She’d moved on to other things. Like basketball. And boys.
I told her it was fine. By then I was way too deeply dug into my real-life glass coffin to care anymore — about her, about the evil I’d promised to protect her from, or even the fact that everyone thought I was crazy.
It wasn’t until the following year that I realized what a mess I’d made of everything.
By then it was too late for Hannah, of course.
I knew I couldn’t blame any of that on John. It’s only in fairy tales that princesses can afford to wait for the handsome